A little more than 20 years ago I met the bravest and most inspiring Christians of my career: thin, middle-aged, rather drab women a church in East Berlin. Each one of them was about half the size of the lounging Stasi thugs on the porch, who wore, instead of the black jackboots you might expect, shiny white trainers. The women inside were on hungerstrike, like their sisters in Leipzig. Their cause seemed utterly hopeless, yet within a week the wall had come down.

I often wonder what they made of it all, because they were not only Christians, but socialists. What they wanted was not capitalism, and certainly not the leering vulgarity of West Berlin, but a purified more human form of socialism. Of course they and their fine sentiments were tossed aside like bladderwrack when the tide of history changed. But still their memory haunts me. It was they who had the courage and self-discipline to act and to bring in a society where neither was valued as they valued it. The fall of the wall was not just a great liberation.

This week, we've chosen as our question "Was 1989 a good year for humanity?" At first we feared there'd be no one to answer in the negative; in fact, today, Hugh O'Shaughnessy does just that. On Monday, Charlotte Methuen, a theology student in West Germany at the time, remembers what it was like to hear a young woman in her train compartment exclaim "Ich bin so froh! Ich bin so froh!" on learning that she had permission to stay in the Federal Republic.

Later in the week we'll have Ulrich Duchrow of Heidelberg University, and marxist historian Peter Thompson.